Typically printers have various printing attributes that dictate the characteristics of a print job. For example, a user may desire that their print job be on letter sized, plain paper with a watermark across each page. In this case, the user would need to configure their print driver on their computer with the desired characteristics. For example, the user would interact with a GUI to configure their print driver with a paper type printing attribute of plain, a paper size printing attribute of letter size, and a watermark enablement printing attribute of ON. When the user prints a job, the configured print driver will instruct the appropriate printer to create the requested print job on letter sized, plain paper with a watermark across each page.
As printers are becoming more and more complex, the number of printing attributes that users need to configure is increasing. For example, today's printers not only have printing attributes that allow users to select from a number of paper types, such as plain paper, recyclable paper, transparencies, etc., but the users may specify, among other things, the trays that various paper types are in, whether watermark is enabled, the orientation of the watermark, the color of the watermark, the level of print quality, whether to collate, whether to duplex, whether pages should be stapled, and the location of the staples. As a result, the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for configuring the print driver are also becoming more complex. For example, when users need to access a printing attribute, the users have to remember or figure out where in the complicated GUI the printing attribute is displayed and/or modified.
One approach to addressing the increasing complexity of presenting printing attributes to users is to group similar printing attributes together under a particular page that has an associated tab (referred to hereinafter as a “tabbed page”). For example, printing attributes that dictate input to a printer, such as the paper type and what tray that paper type is in, may be grouped under a tabbed page for paper, whereas, printing attributes that dictate whether watermarks are enabled and what the watermark looks like may be grouped under a tabbed page for watermarks. However, this still requires the user to remember which tabbed page particular printing attributes are located under. For example, if a user wants to modify the paper type, the user has to know that paper type may be configured under the tabbed page for paper. Therefore, an improved method for accessing printing attributes is needed.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.